110
The great University of Paris, which through-
out the Middle Ages had been the heart of
Christendom, the centre of its life and heat,
which in the fourteenth century was at its
splendid culmination, and which had meddled with
no feeble hand even in the State, was waning
even in the fifteenth century, when France was
devastated by war and rapine and her schools
were emptied. This University, which had savagely
condemned Joan of Arc, and sent Nicholas Midi to
preach a solemn sermon at the stake, "pro Joannæ
salutari admonitione et populi ædificatione," in the
sixteenth century came out of the religious wars
stripped of its endowments, and deserted by its
students; its curriculum was crassly conservative,
its philosophy buckram, its theology a petrifac-
tion; its forty colleges were closed, grass grew
in its courts, and its public disputations were
abased to the decorous apostasy of the freethinker.
Montpellier was dominated by realism (vitalism).
Francis Bacon had done better to have gone
with Harvey to Padua; almost in the year of
the publication of the De motu cordis, the Par-
liament of Paris issued an edict that no teacher
should promulgate anything contrary to the ac-
cepted doctrines of the ancients.
